r/BeAmazed • u/Wooden-Journalist902 • Nov 15 '25

Technology Hypersonic railgun round goes through metal plates like they are made of paper.

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u/[deleted] Nov 15 '25

There's metal and there's metal. Without knowing the alloy composition and thickness, this isn't saying a great deal.

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u/bd_optics Nov 15 '25

They are capable of shooting a 30g Lexan dart through 5x 1" pieces of armor plate, and still have enough inertia left to embed 5" into reinforced concrete.

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u/[deleted] Nov 15 '25

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u/ActualMole Nov 15 '25

Angling armor serves a dual purpose of increasing the effective thickness of the armor, as well as increasing chance of the projectile ricocheting, or at least veering off course away from important things.

In practice, once projectiles reach a certain speed, they do not behave this predictably. Impacts at high speeds tend to make the projectile or material explode. Similar reason for why the craters on the moon are all circular.

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u/[deleted] Nov 15 '25

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u/GogurtFiend Nov 16 '25

It's less that and more that modern anti-ship weapons often mount either explosive warheads weighing hundreds to thousands of kilos (tank versions usually have a few kilos) or shaped charges nearly a meter wide (tank versions are about a tenth of that).

Shaped charges in tank shells these days can penetrate nearly half a meter of armor steel; you can imagine how a version ten times the diameter would perform.